Status Updates From A History of Kindness

Tributaries, arteries, veins,
we are the river, sometimes weeping,
sometimes laughing
in this brief life
and we can't help it but we love other waters,
opening glorious into one another. . .

Some days I wonder how anyone is content
on plains, on mountains, but then
doesn't water live everywhere
beneath our feet
as it journeys from one holy site to another?

Apple, I call you food
not the red green beauty you are.

It's not wrong
to be afraid. To know it is to be alive.

. . . it was hard to believe
such a small creek might rise up and rage that way
but it became a river. Now I watch what will happen next spring
as this world is changed
and see what comes from that water.

You never know when something, man, storm,
sea creature, a great wind of the sky
might take you to some other shore,
cough you up and drop you down
on new land, into a new story.
Once you were a prophet king.
Now you wear sackcloth and ash.

When you are gentle to the skin of others,
touching them softly, speaking with gentle words,
it is compassion.

When your spirit no longer shines,
you crave gems.

You ask why would they do it.
I think it is in their blood
to leave a forest of cleared trees
a wake of red,
as if they can
or can't
help themselves

Power eats the world.

The underground roots
remember the sound of each beat
that ran through,
each pounding run,
each spill of blood
that parted the world.

They said you only pass on the people's story
by telling it. You keep it by giving
it away. So I do.

How I love this forest,
where the hieroglyphs of insects
work the inner layers of bark
like monks writing unseen in deep silence,
and if you know the true secret of falling
you might summon that magic language.

Bark, when I see you with an injury
and the amber colored sap like golden blood,
I have to wonder if nerves are inside,
if it hurts the same. I can't help
but to bandage you.

sky watchers know what stars tell others
and where the milky way takes us back
to the fold of the galaxy, a spiral trail souls follow
when they walk away from the body rib.

It is hard for some to know
the world is a living being.
They live with forgotten truth
replaced with belief. Perhaps that's why
the books of the Mayans were burned,
and written languages destroyed in the North.

(And perhaps why textbooks have been removed now from most American classrooms).

When the river changed course
and washed land away,
each bend grew sharper.

The hands have their reasons
unknown to the heart,
a needed touch,
the kindness of another skin.

The fingers have their own aims,
to make beauty, to touch softly
something to live by.

The world takes a bit at a time. It takes
what it wants by pain, injury, hunger, war.

The world takes a bit at a time. It takes
what it wants by pain, injury, hunger, war.

The whole world
was the gold you wanted.

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain
as if already prepared for the path of the spirit's journey
to the world of all souls.

A human does throw off the bonds if she can, if she tries, if it's possible.
The body is so finely a miracle of its own, created of the elements
of anything that lived on earth
where everything that was
still is.

They walk on the ghosts
of all that has gone before them